Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday November 28, 2012 @02:01PM
from the inconsistent-ux-kills-linux-desktop dept.

Already available in third party repositories, the GNOME 2 fork MATE and GNOME 3 fork Cinnamon will now be included in Fedora 18. From the H: "After almost two months' delay, the Fedora Project has released the first and final beta of Fedora 18. The distribution, which is code-named 'Spherical Cow,' includes the MATE desktop – a continuation of the classic GNOME 2 interface – in its repositories for the first time. Fedora 18's default edition uses GNOME 3.6.2 as its interface and a separate KDE Spin provides the KDE Software Collection 4.9.3; Xfce 4.10 and version 1.6.7 of Linux Mint's Cinnamon are also available from the distribution's repositories."

Since RedHat uses Fedora as a base when they build their enterprise distribution, is there any chance that MATE will now get there? We're using RHEL 5 and 6 on some desktops, running really good crafted versions of GNOME 2. And I'm not looking forward to the day RHEL 7 comes out with what I assume will be GNOME 3. I like some of the things they are doing, and one day it will probably be as good as GNOME 2; but that day is not now. Getting MATE included into RHEL would certainly be a good thing.

I would guess that it is practically a given. RHEL7 is supposedly going to be forked from F18.

I would guess not. Though RHEL7 will be based on F18 or thereabouts, RHEL only includes a subset of the packages that exist in Fedora. Remember that Red Hat will be supporting the packages for 10 years. They'll choose the package subset with care. But on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised to see MATE in EPEL7.

I keep hearing from random posters on various sites that RHEL # was forked from Fedora( core) #. Has there EVER been an official statement like that? I know fedora is a testbed, but I've never seen any evidence of a fork. I find it more likely that they take a stable kernel, and build around it stable releases of the important packages that are known to work well together.

All right; it's a fair statement that "forked from" is an oversimplification. "Based on" might be more accurate.RHEL 2.1 was based on Red

I doubt default gnome3 will be the standard for RHEL. I doubt the workstation market would pay for it since it means a different workflow so a gnome2 resembling MATE makes sense in this context.I've got one guy on gnome3 and he loves it but others just think it's too weird and want something that looks like gnome2 (so they are currently on gnome2), or a minority on KDE, XFCE, fluxbox, E16 or E17.My one and only problem with gnome3 is deliberately breaking gnome2 compatibility in an incredibly stupid way -

I really recommend you give Gnome3 a chance. There is a lot of hate towards it that I don't understand. It is just new... that's all. It still does everything I expect from a window manager.

I even like it. Took a little while but I also have an older machine with Gnome2 and I find it almost unusable and archaic when I have to use it. I really, really recommend you give gnome3 a good chance.

ps. I was also mister no transitions, no wobbly windows... don't waste my cycles with gnome2.

But whilst I'm at it Gnome 3 is absolutely not worth a try. The gnome project should be buried as of this point. Their attitude towards their users was so disgracefully arrogant that every developer associated with gnome should be permanently sent to pariah land.

There is no way in hell anything from that bunch of self righteous pricks is geting anywhere near a system of mine again.

The next major release of RHEL will almost undoubtedly have some classic desktop included. No enterprises will be able to migrate to Gnome 3 easily so there will have to be an option. Since they've put MATE and Cinnamon in F18, I am guessing one or both of those will be available. This is great news for F18, I am looking forward to using it very soon!!!

No doubt this will prompt the weenies to suggest (for the two thousandth time) that everyone who freely chose to work on these individual projects should drop everything, "join forces", and devote their precious time and effort to one unified project. What these people somehow missed -- even though it is blindingly obvious -- is that each of those developers freely chose to work on their project -- based on their own personal goals, not yours. And the reason why all of these projects are individually succes

There is still some obvious areas where human resources are clearly wasted. For example the OSS community puts huge effort only in repackaging the same software in various package formats and in slightly differing directory structures.

After struggling to use Gnome 3 since Fedora officially released it, I recently tried XFCE again and was blown away with how fast and suitable it is. The defaults are good and there are tons of options to customize it back to the similar paradigm Gnome 2 was. I couldn't believe how much faster my machine felt after switching. Even moving Firefox tabs was better!

I gave G3 PLENTY of time and never could feel comfortable with it even after slowly adding extension after extension to get something workable. The visual component of a desktop is important, and the G3 simply hides too much that is necessary to use it. It's like having a car with no dashboard. The so-called "easy"methods to reveal open windows and find applications are hard to discover, require too much input and memory, and are too slow.

After this weekend's pleasurable re-discovery of the improved XFCE, I'm never going back. Gnome doesn't matter any more to me.

Xfce 4.10 is very, very good. It has an excellent selection of applets. Automount of removable media and easy unmount support is good. You can now customize both the desktop icons and objects in the file manager to activate on single click (happens to be a must for me).

I have to admit being rather disappointed with XFCE, mostly around the standard desktop tools. I especially missed Nautilus. I ended up back to G3 running in fallback mode and have been really happy with that.

I've been plugging this for a while. Fedora+XFCE the most usable and stable linux desktop I've ever used. (The XFCE "spin" comes with XFCE installed/default)XFCE is clean and simple and consistent. It's lightweight but functional. It's visually pleasant and not gaudy. It's familiar yet well suited for it's job. (Lets face it, after nearly decade of being the most popular OS in the world, XP's UI is pretty much the standard by which all others are based)

Yes, I know. MATE [mate-desktop.org] and Cinnamon [sourceforge.net] aren't in the official repositories yet, but that's only a matter of getting a bigger hammer.

To be fair, there is a big difference between having a desktop environment and window manager which run on a system and having all of its features fully integrated and supported. I can quite happily run FVWM on my desktop, but things start getting awkward when I run an application which expects to find a dock or notification area from Gnome.

I installed cinnamon on Ubuntu and it was dookie there, too, which is odd since the dist it was made for is just a tweaked Ubuntu. Not only did it take almost half a minute to start (I have an SSD, Unity takes just a couple seconds) but it was flaky and crashy thereafter. Cinnamon ain't ready for primetime, sorry.

Personally, I do not really get all the hype around Cinnamon. In my experience, it is unstable, bug ridden and hard to use.

MATE, on the other, works like charm for me. My last linux upgrade was painful voyage trying Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, Xfce, Cinnamon... finding no love with either. But then, Mint MATE, I fell in love immediately - everything works out of box as expected.

KDE and Razor Qt are the future. Gnome was nice but not anymore. Dolphin is so much better than what Nautilus has to offer. I would say, simply port KDE to LLVM and we'll get a bulletproof desktop system.

I'm all for a more conventional desktop environment, but do any of these alternative use the gnome 3 libraries? Or are we going to basically have 2 versions of gnome installed, one for the UI and one for the apps?

Sure some apps (GIMP in particular) still need the older libraries but the world needs to move to 3.

Actually the new gimp needs the new libs which is why I moved one user to gnome3. The thing that sucks is plenty of other stuff needs old applications which will not run under gnome3 - the gnome guys have brought DLL hell to linux by using an insane and incompatible naming system so the usual *nix behaviour of just having the old libraries as well as new to run the old stuff is not enough. It is deliberate breakage.